Thousands of anti-government protesters marched through the streets of Bangkok on Monday, calling the prime minister a ‘murderer’ and demanding that he should resign over the violent quashing of a previous rally.
   The demonstrators have stepped up their protests against prime minister Somchai Wongsawat since a protest outside parliament October 7 ended in a violent confrontation with police that left one demonstrator dead and hundreds of others injured.
   Pressure on Somchai increased last week when the powerful army chief hinted he should resign, leading to fears the military would carry out its second coup in two years.
   Somchai has brushed aside calls for his resignation, saying he would await the outcome of an investigation into the violence that was expected to conclude in the coming weeks.
   Many of those marching Monday held posters of Somchai over the word ‘murderer.’ A huge banner on a sound truck showed pictures of the police crackdown, calling it ‘Murder at the Thai parliament.’
   ‘The government is killing the people. They ordered the police to kill the people and we want justice,’ said Nutr Thumpatpong, a 20-year-old student.
   The anti-government People’s Alliance for Democracy has called for Somchai’s resignation since he took power last month, branding him a puppet of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a telecommunications billionaire, accused of corruption and abuse of power. Thaksin fled to London to escape corruption charges.
   Thaksin faces his first possible conviction Tuesday when the Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver a verdict in a corruption case against him and his wife, Pojaman. The case stems from Pojaman’s 2003 purchase of a plot of land in central Bangkok from a government agency at a deflated price while Thaksin was prime minister.
   Thaksin has been charged with malfeasance and corruption. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
   The PAD march, which caused traffic jams in a main shopping area for an hour, was peaceful as protesters distributed books and CDs of photos they said showed police brutality, reports Reuters/Bdnews24.com.
   The ruling is the first in a spate of corruption charges against Thaksin and his political associates prepared by graft investigators appointed after a military coup in 2006.
   If found guilty, Thaksin, who skipped bail in August and now lives in Britain with his wife and adult children, faces up to 10 years in jail. He cannot appeal against the verdict.
   PAD leaders, who accuse the government of being a proxy for Thaksin, said on Sunday they were afraid pro-government elements might try to stop the court delivering its verdict, but government supporters denied this.
   ‘It just a tactic by the PAD to bring more people to the rally. We have no reason to do that,’ Jatuporn Prompan, a member of parliament with the ruling People Power Party told Reuters, referring to allegations it wanted to disrupt court proceedings.
   The political crisis dates back to 2005 when the PAD, which has the explicit backing of Queen Sirikit, launched street protests against Thaksin. It has meandered through a coup to elections and back to protests and shows no signs of resolution.

Russia and India were Monday laying the groundwork for the signing of a civil nuclear energy deal, following New Delhi’s signing of similar pacts with Washington and Paris, officials said.
   Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was in India for talks with his counterpart Pranab Mukherjee as well as prime minister Manmohan Singh, ahead of an expected visit to New Delhi in December by president Dmitry Medvedev.
   An Indian foreign ministry official said the two former Cold War allies were expected to sign an atomic energy deal when Medvedev makes his first visit on December 5.
   The pact, agreed on during a visit by former Russian president Vladimir Putin in January 2007, envisages Russia building four reactors in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
   India is now allowed to shop for technology and nuclear reactors after the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group lifted its ban on New Delhi in early September following hard lobbying by Washington.
   India has a nuclear market estimated at 100 billion euros (142 billion dollars) over 15 years.
   India and Russia are also looking at a pact allowing joint development of weapon systems, officials said.
   Seventy percent of Indian military equipment is of Russian origin, but late deliveries and commercial disagreements have pushed New Delhi towards other suppliers, including the United States, France, Britain and Israel.

Australia hosted the first meeting of a new international nuclear non-proliferation body Monday, with foreign minister Stephen Smith saying he was hopeful of progress on disarmament.
   Members of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, first proposed by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd in June, met for the first time in Sydney for two days of talks early Monday.
   The commission, chaired by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and Japan’s former top diplomat Yoriko Kawaguchi, is tasked with reinvigorating the global debate on the spread of nuclear weapons and disarmament.
    ‘We think the timing might just be right for some success in this area,’ Smith told reporters in Canberra. ‘It’s a very strong commission.’
   Smith said the Australian government would give 3.8 million dollars (2.66 million US) to the body, which was proposed by Rudd following a visit to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first atomic attack.
   The commission will focus on the success of a 2010 conference on the 40-year-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and promote discussion on the need for disarmament and to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
   Smith said he and Rudd had met with the body’s commissioners, who include former US secretary of defence William Perry and Norway’s former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, in Sydney on Sunday.
    ‘We made the point to them... we see this as a genuine second track, or non-government dialogue which will encourage a sharp focus by the international community on short-term good results from the NPT conference but also to start moving forward again on nuclear disarmament,’ Smith said.
   Asked whether any nuclear-armed nations would abandon their nuclear weapons, Smith said: ‘We certainly hope so.
    ‘I don’t use the phrase forseeable future, but it’s the Australian government’s long-term objective that the manufacture, the possession of nuclear weapons, cease,’ he said.

The Sri Lankan government said Monday that scores of its troops had been killed or injured in several days of fierce fighting with the Tamil Tigers, its biggest reported losses in months.
   The island’s defence ministry said its troops had edged closer to the rebels’ northern capital of Kilinochchi, but the battles since Saturday had left 33 soldiers dead, three missing in action and 48 injured.
   The ministry said the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam also suffered heavy casualties, with the bodies of 11 rebels recovered from the battlefield.
   ‘Troops have captured approximately half a square kilometre of land area from the LTTE,’ the ministry said in a statement, referring to fighting on Sunday.
   The main frontlines are currently around 10 to 15 kilometres (six to nine miles) away from Kilinochchi, according to military officials.
   Sri Lanka’s hawkish government — which pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered truce in January — had said several weeks ago that its troops were poised to capture Kilinochchi.
   But army units, despite high morale and a wave of public support in the ethnic Sinhalese-majority south, appear to have been held back by dogged rebel resistance.
   The military had claimed over the weekend that it had breached the final LTTE defence line protecting Kilinochchi.
   Aid officials who had rare access to the region said the Tigers had built a network of bunkers and other defences in the area, from where local civilians were evacuated weeks ago to other LTTE-held parts of the north.
   The casualty figures given Monday marked the biggest single loss for the security forces since April, when 43 soldiers were killed and 38 reported injured after an offensive on the Jaffna peninsula north of Kilinochchi.
   Since then, the military had moved into rebel-held areas by taking a different route through the northern mainland.
   There was no immediate comment from the LTTE, but the pro-rebel Puthinam.com website said the ethnic rebels had allowed government troops to advance into their territory only to hit them with heavy fire.
   Still, the defence ministry said government soldiers, backed by aircraft and artillery fire, were advancing on at least two other fronts and had inflicted casualties on the Tigers.
   Tens of thousands of people have died on both sides since the LTTE launched its campaign for an independent state in 1972.

Armed with a potentially lucrative civil nuclear technology deal, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Japan to push energy and trade partnerships and China for a summit of Asian and European nations this week.
   India and the United States earlier this month signed a deal that will allow India to buy civilian nuclear technology for the first time in three decades, seen as bolstering its strategic clout in Asia.
   Japan, which had supported India’s inclusion in the Nuclear Suppliers Group despite strong local opposition over India’s failure to sign nonproliferation accords, is keen to participate in the Indian nuclear energy market estimated to be worth around $27 billion over the next 15 years.
   The two countries will be looking to boost trade, which is small compared with the flow between the fast-growing economies of India and China, and cementing what some analysts see as an alliance of democracies in Asia to counterbalance China.

Public support for Japanese prime minister Taro Aso fell to just over one-third in a media poll published Monday, the latest bad news for the premier as he considers whether to call a snap election.
   Speculation is mounting that Aso, who took office last month, will call an early vote for the lower house in a bid to break a stalemate in parliament although no election need be held until September 2009.
   But worries about fallout on Japan’s faltering economy from the global financial crisis, and concern about a dip in ratings for the premier and his party could stay Aso’s hand, analysts say.
   Support for Aso’s cabinet fell 36 percent in a weekend survey by the Mainichi newspaper, down nine points from September. The telephone survey covered 1,044 respondents.
   The survey also showed that more respondents would want the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to win in a general election.
   Forty-eight percent said they want the Democrats to win, up 11 points from the previous survey, while 36 per

A British woman working for a Christian charity in Afghanistan was shot dead in Kabul as she walked to work, officials and the British embassy said on Monday.
   ‘We are confirming that we are dealing with the death of a British national,’ an embassy spokesman in Kabul told AFP.
   Afghan officials had said earlier that the woman was a South African national. The killing was claimed by Taliban insurgents.
   An employee at SERVE Afghanistan, which describes itself as a Christian charity, confirmed the incident to AFP but would not give any further details.
   Interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said the attackers had fled immediately and their motive was unclear.
   It was also not known if they worked for the Taliban, an extremist Islamic militia that has carried out several similar assassinations in the southern city of Kandahar.
    ‘Two armed men sitting on a motorbike shot her dead. Some bullets hit her body and some hit her leg and when police got there she was dead,’ Bashary said.
   A witness said he had seen the woman walk along the same route to work in the upmarket western Kart-e-Char suburb for about two years.

Libya may agree to buy more than $2 billion worth of Russian weapons during a visit by Muammar Gaddafi to Moscow this month, Interfax news agency reported on Monday, citing an unidentified source in Russia’s arms industry.
   ‘An agreement on concluding a major set of arms contracts for more than $2 billion could be reached during the visit of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to Moscow,’ Interfax quoted the source as saying.
   The source said Gaddafi’s visit to Moscow was planned for the end of October. Both the Libyan embassy in Moscow and Russia’s state arms exporter declined immediate comment.
   Russian warships visited Libya this month, signalling a warming of ties between Tripoli and Moscow, which supported Libya during the Soviet era.
   Libya is interested in buying surface-to-air missile systems such as the S-300, TOR-M1 and Buk, as well as several fighter aircraft, dozens of helicopters and about 50 tanks, Interfax quoted the source as saying.
   Russia is also preparing contracts to upgrade Libya’s Soviet-era weapons, the agency said.
   Libya wants Moscow to write off $4.5 billion in debts it owes to Russia in exchange for the purchases, Interfax said. Many Soviet-era debts are difficult to price because they were set in Soviet rubles.
   Libya was seen as a rogue state by Washington until it agreed to give up a weapons of mass destruction program. Last month U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Gaddafi in Tripoli, the first such visit in 55 years.
   Libya wants to expand ties with Russia, which it sees as a counterbalance to US influence in the Mediterranean region.
   Vladimir Putin, while still Russian president, visited Libya in April to strengthen energy ties with the OPEC member and discuss the possibility of Russian cooperation in building an atomic power plant in Libya.
   Putin said at the time that Libya was also seeking to buy Russian weapons.

Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai boycotted regional talks Monday aimed at salvaging a troubled power-sharing deal after emergency travel documents were only delivered at the last minute.
   Tsvangirai had been due to meet in Swaziland’s capital Mbabane with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and other southern African leaders to break a weeks-long deadlock over forming a unity government.
   But the opposition’s lead negotiator Tendai Biti told reporters in Johannesburg that Tsvangirai had only received emergency travel documents late Sunday, calling the delay an ‘insult’ to the man meant to become prime minister under the unity accord.
   Tsvangirai has not been granted a normal passport for nearly one year, and is only allowed to leave the country on emergency travel documents valid for a single trip.
   ‘We are not travelling with this (emergency document). It’s an insult,’ Biti said.
   He urged the Southern African Development Community, a 15-nation regional bloc, to convene an emergency summit to find a solution to the crisis.
    ‘We want an extraordinary meeting of SADC not only to look at outstanding issues but to say to President Mugabe: ‘enough is enough’,’ he said.
   Biti insisted his party would not pull out of the power-sharing deal, despite Tsvangirai’s boycott of Monday’s meeting.
    ‘We’ll be the last to walk out of the deal,’ he said.
   An official with Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change in Harare said the delay in issuing the travel document showed that Mugabe was not sincere in wanting to negotiate.
   Mugabe’s regime ‘seemed to not be taking the issue seriously,’ the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
   Tsvangirai’s boycott cast greater doubt on the unity deal, which was brokered by former South African leader Thabo Mbeki more than one month ago.
   Under the deal, 84-year-old Mugabe would remain as president while Tsvangirai takes the new post of prime minister.

China faces a looming health crisis if efforts are not made to tackle the effects of changing diets and lifestyles due to rising standards of living, medical experts warned in a report published on Monday.
   The report published in The Lancet medical journal is the latest to warn that the worsening diets and other unhealthy habits of increasingly wealthy Chinese threaten to trigger epidemics of heart and lung disease.
   It offered praise for China’s efforts over the decades to curb infectious diseases — once the country’s predominant health threat.
   But it noted that Chinese people were becoming victims of the country’s steadily rising standards of living.
   ‘The pace and spread of behavioural changes including changing diets, decreased physical activity, high rates of male smoking and other high-risk behaviours has accelerated to an unprecedented degree,’ said the report in the Britain-based journal.
   It said 177 million Chinese adults suffer from hypertension, which it blamed in part on high salt consumption.
   Another 300 million people smoke, the vast majority of them men, and 530 million are exposed to second-hand smoke.
   ‘If present smoking rates continue, 100 million Chinese men will die between 2000 and 2050, with many of their family members squandering life savings in desperate attempts at treatment,’ it warned.
   It called on China’s government to launch campaigns to discourage smoking and the intake of salt and fat.
   Failure to do so could result in an onerous health and economic burden on the country, it said.

Six Nobel prize winners Monday voiced outrage over death threats hounding the author of hard-hitting mafia expose ‘Gomorrah,’ urging the Italian government to assume its ‘responsibility’ to protect him.
   ‘It is intolerable that all this can happen in Europe, and in 2008,’ the six including Nobel peace laureates Mikhail Gorbachev and Desmond Tutu wrote in the Italian daily La Repubblica.
   ‘With our signatures ... we call the state to its responsibilities,’ they wrote, days after Roberto Saviano announced plans to flee Italy after learning that the southern Camorra mafia want him dead by the end of the year.
   ‘The state must make every effort possible to protect him and defeat the Camorra,’ said the letter, also signed by Nobel literature prize winners Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, German author Günter Grass and Italian playwright Dario Fo.
   The sixth signatory is Italian Nobel medicine laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, now a senator for life in Italy.
   Some 1.2 million copies of 28-year-old Saviano’s book have sold in Italy, while the screen version of ‘Gomorrah’ won second prize at the 2008 Cannes film festival and is now in the running for an Oscar.
   The film directed by Matteo Garrone, shot in flat realist style, follows a web of characters from teenaged gunmen to a Camorra cashier to a wealthy businessman behind illegal toxic waste-dumping schemes.
   Saviano, whose book has been translated into 42 languages, has lived under police protection for two years.
   But the Nobel prizewinners wrote: ‘Saviano’s case is not only a police matter. It’s a problem of democracy. Saviano’s freedom concerns all of us as citizens.’
   Saviano wrote in La Repubblica last week: ‘I want a life, I want a home. I want to fall in love, to drink a beer in public. ... I want to laugh and not talk about myself as if I were a patient with a terminal disease.’
   Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi last week vowed to ‘eliminate’ the mafia from southern Italy with a ‘tough and merciless fight.’
   The conservative leader, who came to power for a third time in May largely on a security platform, said he and Interior Minister Roberto Maroni were finalising an offensive to be unleashed soon.
   ‘You’ll see, we will succeed in eradicating organised crime in the south,’ he told the daily Il Giornale.

Iran says its failure to win a seat on the UN Security Council is an injustice. Japan defeated Iran in a secret ballot Friday to secure the non-permanent Asian seat on the Council. Japan won 158 votes while Iran got 32 votes.
   Ten of the Security Council’ 15 seats are filled by regional groups for two-year periods. The other five are held by veto-wielding permanent members.
   Iran’ foreign ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi told reporters in Tehran on Monday that there was ‘no logical reason’ for Japan to ‘monopolie’ that seat. Japan has served ten times on the Council.

Britain’s defence ministry made public secret files on UFO sightings Monday, with the dossier including reports ranging from a woman claiming to be an alien to calm pilots giving objective accounts.
   The 19 different incidents were recorded between 1986 and 1992, and published by the National Archives on its website.
   Among the recorded incidents was a letter dated March 1990 from a woman who claimed she was an alien whose spaceship landed during World War II and was recovered by the British military.
   ‘The crashed vehicle contained two males from Spectra, a planet orbiting the star Zeta Tucanae, and a female from one of the two inhabited planets in the Sirius system, Amazon the planet of warrior women,’ she wrote in the letter, which also included sketches of herself and of Spectrans.

A Turkish court on Monday began hearing a case against 86 people accused of plotting to overthrow the Islamist-rooted government after a chaotic opening that forced an immediate adjournment.
   The judge ordered a pause within minutes after lawyers protested they could not work properly in the tiny courtroom, packed with supporters of the accused, spectators and an army of journalists.
    ‘I have been doing this job for 50 years and never saw such conditions,’ one of the lawyers said as others complained they did not have space even to use their laptop computers — the charge sheet alone is about 2,455 pages long.
   The court later resumed the case, but said it would first hear the testimonies of the 46 suspects remanded in custody. The remaining suspects will give testimony in separate hearings, it said.
   The judge also ordered that a video screen be set up in an adjoining room for journalists and relatives of the defendants to watch the proceedings at the courtroom in a prison complex in Silivri, a town near Istanbul.